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1.7.3-Pilferingapples
Brick!club, Les Miserables, 1.7.3 A Tempest Within A Brain My own brain’s been pretty full of lightning today, so that may account for why I can come up with anything coherent or useful to say about this chapter. Hugo finally quite all pretense about the Madeljean thing, at least— though now I’m wondering if there isn’t more at play there than messing with the reader? Valjean seems to have turned Madeleine into a real alter ego, an entirely different person than Valjean. After his transfiguration scene, “he was no longer the same man” and “Jean Valean shrank and faded away”. Was all the Who Is This Madeleine stuff and the obvious clues tying him to Valjean not setting up a mystery for the readers, but a reflection of Madeleine/Valjean’s self-enforced personality divide— that he’s been trying to go with Jean Valjean is Nothing Now in a real sense, eliminate even the memory of his old self and make Valjean a completely separate person in his own eyes, which is impossible because of all these signifiers— and now that person who’s barely himself in his own mind is thrown back into Madeleine’s life and threatening to take it all and the horror of it is only partly the prison and partly that his carefully maintained self-delusion is being shredded? AM I THE ONLY PERSON WHO IS JUST NOW GETTING THIS holy monkeys why am I even allowed to read this book, it is WAY too smart for me. …uh, anyway. My own agonizing lack of reading comprehension aside, I’ve always really liked this chapter? It’s that poetic prose thing that Hugo does so well, and much like the Man Overboard metaphor I like it so much that I don’t have much to say. Yay, this chapter, it’s a good chapter and it should feel good. …And I have to go soak my head and hope some of the STUPID leaches out. Also relisten to the first act of the musical because wow, it all just got a lot more perfect. Commentary Aphraseremains Oh, I hadn’t thought about the Madeleine Mystery as reflecting how Valjean is thinking about and constructing his identity, but that makes a lot of sense! We have to be only seeing the surface persona because that’s what he’s trying to make real; he’s ignoring all that internal stuff and his past that makes him Valjean, and so we don’t get access to it until he’s forced to acknowledge it. Which makes all of the stuff where he sacrifices “his personal security to his moral principles” in ways that are all about acknowledging his past (mourning the bishop, inquiring after his family) even more interesting. Acknowledging Valjean is always his moral duty, even when he’d rather be doing no such thing and just being Madeleine. Gascon-en-exile Lord in heaven, look down on me in mercy for considering this chapter too heinously long to dissect. It’s really just an extended soliloquy anyway that provides superb insight into Valjean’s character, primarily through a question-and-answer deliberation that reminds one of the Socratic method and, more importantly given its theological uses, medieval scholasticism such as that in the writing of St. Thomas Aquinas. At any rate, this may just be the most painful and protracted self-examination ever that doesn’t end in murder and/or suicide, so I suppose that’s a credit to Valjean’s moral rectitude and lack of morbidity. Clearly has some identity issues, though, but since he spends most of the Brick under one alias or another that’s not hard to imagine. Pilferingapples (reply to Gascon-en-exile) ..Wow, that’s some good Socractic method, since I didn’t even notice it and popular overuse has made me hiss at it like an angry duck. Also I’m a sucker for blatant use of musical quotes in posts whooops. Kalevala-sage This tab has been open since immediately after you posted it—I’m an awful clubber with 40+ saved drafts; and, for that matter, this apology has remained incomplete in the tab since perhaps four days ago. I am sorry. I truly dislike and tend to refrain from retroblogging, especially insofar as Brick!Club is concerned—I did however see 1.7.3 circling as late as yesterday (referring to 17 May 2013), and the emotional allure of this chapter is a bit great for me to ignore. There is perhaps no better a way to illustrate my untimely reaction than with a quote from the chapter itself, evoking a sort of Jungian collective unconscious: “''Faire le poème de la conscience humaine, ne fût-ce qu’à propos d’un seul homme, ne fût-ce qu’à propos du plus infime des hommes, ce serait fondre toutes les épopées dans une épopée supérieure et définitive''”1—and be my reading deviant from Jung’s intents or no, Hugo’s storytelling has here resonated with my individual experience through the perhaps more esoteric aspects of Jean Valjean. That said, this is hardly a rich textual analysis, but rather more of a personal wank with a few quotes interspersed, so definitely feel free to pass on it—have a cut, even. Translations of French quotes at the bottom; they are my own and they are pretty bad and, dear God, they have opened the can of worms that is footnoting. In the spirit of full disclosure (as if true disclosure were actually possible from me), “Jarku” is quite seriously my “real name,” though it’s not the one I’ve had since birth—I adopted it when I was eleven or twelve and first playing with Finnish phonetics, and though it has coincidentally wound up to be a shockingly common, sufficiently generic, and irrevocably gendered given name in that tongue, I’ve for years taken it on as my permanent handle as so many genderqueer individuals separate themselves from those with which we were endowed at birth. The foreignness helps convey an androgyny the name itself wouldn’t in its native language, and hilariously enough has the side effect of getting misidentified as another ethnicity I’m ubiquitously said to resemble. Recognition under common law is a real possibility for me as people and employers and such all acknowledge my choice and visceral aversion to my birth name. While Jarku is nothing more nor less than a name—no special magickal truename here, surprisingly—my original one isn’t something I really enjoy speaking aloud or even writing (and, whoops, disclosure just got a whole lot less full). Unsurprising, then, that I’ve written at length before on the notion of names, mostly intertextually; here, though, is the question of Les Mis, or specifically “''Une tempête sous un crâne'',” in isolation. Unfortunately, this literary pseudo-kin to my nomenclature issues is treated less-than-ideally, as even before Valjean/Madeleine’s inner turmoil is exposed his life is limned as an unfairly impious one. Evidently Valjean isn’t Bienvenu and can’t expect his acts to share that sort of authorial ejaculation, but the emphasis on his dual allegiances to himself and to God are presented as though he has no right to the former: the parallel structure of this narrative, insisting he “''vécut paisible, rassuré et espérant, n’ayant plus que deux pensées: cacher son nom, et sanctifier sa vie; échapper aux hommes, et revenir à Dieu'',”3 suggests a concreteness to the former parts of each phrase and an abstraction to the latter. Which isn’t technically inaccurate—Christ is far more ethereal in Catholicism than Protestantism, in any case—but that dichotomy might be further interpreted to read baseness versus holiness, or worse, what Valjean is actually doing versus his more theoretical aspirations. Slightly later in the passage, when it is said of Valjean’s twin motives that “''elles le tournaient vers l’ombre; elles le faisaient bienveillant et simple; elles lui conseillaient les mêmes choses'',”4 evil is pretty explicitly more tangibly-worded than the nebulous “benevolence endowment” that makes up the other half—no props for guessing which half is which, their “accord” be damned. Less than pleasing also is the implication that Valjean is sinning in the process of hiding himself. Not only does my characteristic lighting commentary necessitate a report of every incandescence in this novel (though that does seem to have become my Tumblr legacy), but if we read the lighting figuratively and for the first time in my case, the symbolism can’t get any heavier than his turning out his light on account that it “embarrassed him.” Indeed, at the mere threat of an utterance of his old name, the narrative frames Valjean’s fear as a worry that “''cette lumière formidable faite pour dissiper le mystère don’t il s’enveloppait resplendirait subitement sur sa tête''”5, that his newly-honed faith might actually be at odds with his attempts at anonymity; and, if light here is taken to stand for neither God nor magic, it is a perfect story of Jarku and Tumblr. Finishing up because I’ve legitimately lost some of my marbles throughout this ever-increasingly long writing, it’s important that Valjean’s identity play isn’t considered so much a transgression of his virtue as the desire to distance himself from an unsavory past, and that’s my quarrel with the narrative. Hugo’s mental banter most explicitly declaims Valjean’s assumed name with with “«''Mon but est atteint!» … Mais quel but? cacher son nom? tromper la police''?”6, which demeans his achievements along with the fact that his run-ins with the Bishop and Petit-Gervais began his new life and were more formative than his real childhood, the one that granted him his other name. Consider that he keeps the chandelles and nothing else of his previous life—Valjean, in short, isn’t there. Perhaps redemption may have been a more noble goal for him, but I speak from experience when I say it’s not necessarily a realistic one. I should end by affirming that this is in no way a denunciation of Valjean. His revelation, if we acquit him of the imaginary sins with which he’s burdened here, is significantly more sacrificial than the “godly duty” we get with Hugo’s editorials; and it’s merely important to me that he is respected for it. 1 "To write the poem of the human conscience around even a single man, around even the the basest of men, would be to melt all the epics into a single one, superior and definitive." The quote continues, “La conscience, c’est le chaos des chimères, des convoitises et des tentatives, la fournaise des rêves, l’antre des idées dont on a honte; c’est le pandémonium des sophismes, c’est le champ de bataille des passions. À de certaines heures, pénétrez à travers la face livide d’un être humain qui réfléchit, et regardez derrière, regardez dans cette âme, regardez dans cette obscurité. Il y a là, sous le silence extérieur, des combats de géants comme dans Homère, des mêlées de dragons et d’hydres et des nuées de fantômes comme dans Milton, des spirales visionnaires comme chez Dante. Chose sombre que cet infini que tout homme porte en soi et auquel il mesure avec désespoir les volontés de son cerveau et les actions de sa vie!”—“The conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of yearnings and efforts, the oven of dreams, the lair of ideas we so shame; it is the pandemonium of reason, the battlefield of passion. At certain hours, pass through the melancholy countenance of a human in thought, and look beyond; look into the soul; look into the void. They are there, under a superficial silence: fights between giants as in Homer, skirmishes between dragons and hydras and mists and ghosts as in Miton, spirals of revelation as in Dante. What a somber thing is this infinity that every man carries in himself, and with which he considers, hopelessly, the wills of his mind and the acts of his life!” Collective unconscious, I tell you. 2 Ideally I won’t be seen as too much of a hypocrite if I call him Valjean; it appears to be fandom standard and slashes will get unwieldy fast. 3 “lived in peace, at ease and hopeful, with no more than two thoughts: to hide his name, and to sanctify his life; to escape men, and to seek God.” 4 “they turned him toward darkness; they made him benevolent and good; they instructed the same things.” 5 “this formidable light, made to subdue the mystery in which he enveloped himself, would shine suddenly on his head.” 6 “’I’ve achieved my goal!’ But which goal? hiding his name? deceiving the police?”